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I arrived and have been volunteering at the New Futures Orphanage in Takeo for a week and a half now. I've been absolutely loving it! The kids are hilarious and great fun to be around. There are 50 of them in total ranging from 6 years old up to 18. I'm staying at a local guesthouse which is $5 a night for a room with your own bathroom and a fan which is pretty awesome value! There is also a centre type building where you have breakfast and dinner that two girls cook each night. The food is really good especially the Khmer curry and the stir fried tofu and beansprouts and for $2.50 for dinner and $1.50 for breakfast you can't go wrong!! During the day we usually pop 50 metres down the track to a little shack that does noodles for 11p which is pretty good!
I've been doing loads of different things during the day ranging from epic Jenga sessions with one of the boys Ty who seems to love it, to helping building ceilings and cookers. The ceiling was for a food storage room which was pretty open to the elements so we managed to get
"HELLO"
Happy family we drove past on the way to the village school. it all sealed up and cleaned out so that they have a better place to store all the bags of rice etc. We also spent a couple of days rebuilding some cookers that were broken, so we dug out the insides of them and re-cemented them up so that they fit the huge cooking pots that they use to cook for the kids. That job was ridiculously hot, with no breeze and in the blazing sun we spent most of the time standing and sweating!
The kids go to a local school and rotate when they are there so half are there in the morning and half in the afternoon and there is always loads of kids around the orphanage to entertain. We've been drawing, painting, reading and all sorts of things!
On the saturday, instead of watching Star Movies the local film channel, which we seem to do every night, we decided to go out and see the nightlife around Takeo which doesn't really consist of much! We sent off Macara (one of the guys who helps out at the orphanage) to get hold of a couple of bottles of rice wine for us to kick off
Cookers
Cementing in the cookers the evening. Playing drinking games with rice wine is not for the feint hearted! It tastes absolutely vile and the smell is even worse. So after a few shots of the chaos juice we headed off to a local concert that was happening in the football field up the road. There here a good few hundred people there all listening intently to some pretty awful local crooners up on stage, but it really kicked off when the "oh yes" song came on which basically consisted of some girl screaming "oh yes, oh yes, oh yes" over and over again to a lone strobe light. The concert quickly became pretty grating so we decided to hit the local karaoke joint. The karaoke over here is so different to back home and you are provided with your own personal room with tv and wireless microphones (they take it pretty seriously here) and they dump a whole load of beers and ice in there and let you get on with it, counting the empties at the end to determine the price. I opted to do a rendition of Let It Be which Sam, an American guy also volunteering here helped me out with.
green girl
Girl who loves green! It was probably the best version i've heard, some may say better than the original...
I've been for a couple of trips down to the local market in Takeo which is a ten minute walk from the orphanage, it's really good just to wander around and see what's going on and to try some weird and wonderful fruits. Donny, Sarah, Camilla and I went on an early morning photo outing down to the market one morning which was great fun plus there is always the added bonus of stopping off at the petrol station on the way back which has air con set ridiculously low so it's like walking into Antarctica. Very nice!! They even have some seats at the window for you to chill out in! The days here are all around about 40 degrees so it's definitely a welcome relief!
For the last couple of days there has been a wedding happening opposite the centre which was pretty cool to look into although there were armed police guards on the door so any chance of trying to sneakily crash it or take pictures became a bit more daunting! We stood outside with a load of local
Takeo Saturday night
Going wild in Takeo... ha (Mark, Rebecca, Monica, Sam and Makara) kids on the last night of it and watched some of the guests dancing around and stuff. The kids were desperate to get their photos taken and it was great fun letting them see them on the back of the camera!
Yesterday a few of us went for the afternoon to a little village school about 20km out of town to do some English teaching. It was an amazing day and the kids were so well behaved! When we arrived the 100 or so children all stood up put their arms crossed over their chests and said together "Hello!! Welcome teachers" haha
I'm off for some breakfast now before a day down at the orphanage. Not sure what I'll be doing but I'm sure it will involve a game of Jenga and a bowl of noodles somewhere along the way.
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John W
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Settling in
Nice one Nick. Good to hear things are going well. Great pictures! Who is this Paddy Fields fellow? Cheers J